Child sexual abuse and recovery: historicising survivor and practitioner experiences (c1950-2022)

Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) is not an illness or a physical wound.

And yet recovery is spoken about in a language borrowed from medicine, we seek to ‘heal wounds’ and ‘repair damage.’ The language and ‘logics’ of trauma now dominate public services, emphasising psychological recovery and ignoring other forms of social support that individuals need to achieve emotional and physical equilibrium’.(1) In research, survivors’ needs are ignored in favour of measuring the clinical efficacy of specific treatments.(2) Their recovery is frequently hindered rather than helped by medical and social welfare interventions.(3) Their views are given less credence, their ‘stories’ are generalised across time, place and identity.(4) The experiences of the minoritized and structural inequalities are ignored.

But, as Joanna Bourke has shown, context matters in relation to effective responses to sexual violence.(5) This is the first social, cultural and medical history into recovery from CSA in the second half of twentieth century Britain and Ireland.

Via a mixed methods approach, it will offer a rare insight into the experiences of survivors and frontline practitioners, who are commonly left out of the historical record. It brings the two groups together to learn from past experiences and influence present-day practice and policy.